Bandwagons. I don’t like them. I’m not sure what the catalyst might have been – perhaps Madeline Miller’s Circe or Stephen Fry’s dreadful Mythos (both books I have long since gifted to charity shops) – but something opened the floodgates on retellings of Greek Mythology (mythology I like, by the way). And the covers of these books are all of the same ilk too. Bandwagons, like I said.
Because it was Pat Barker (and thinking of the ‘Regeneration’ trilogy) I was prepared to give The Voyage Home a chance. It’s a retelling, yes, but it’s well enough written to earn – and keep -its place on my bookshelves.
But at the end of the day, it’s just a story.
It occurs to me that – intellectually snobbish or not – that may be the issue I have with ‘genre fiction’, the idea that they’re ‘just’ stories. Of course Conrad or Austen or Woolf are telling stories too, but there is something ‘extra’ in them, something other, an additional mirror held up to the human condition. I had no sense of such a mirror in The Voyage Home. But that shouldn’t stop you from reading it – if you like stories…
Ian Gouge - Writer 